Paper short abstract:

Death and incarceration define the margins of society, and for long have been at the margins of valuation. This paper examines how both phenomena have been brought into the realm of calculation and valuation, with consequences for democracy and regimes of quantified personal accountability.

Paper long abstract:

Just as life has been made subject to practices of valuation, so too can death. Likewise, with the antinomy of freedom and incarceration. This paper examines two cases of valuation and calculation at the margins: one pertains to the entry of mortality statistics into the apparatus of calculation surrounding UK hospitals, the other pertains to the quantification of decency in UK correctional services. These two very different examples demonstrate how new tools of quantification, with their attendant and highly technical disputes and debates, can accord a particular and new visibility for phenomena. They demonstrate also how this in turn can contribute to the creation and contestation of hierarchies of importance, particularly in domains that are so central to democratic societies, but which have historically been seen as beyond the scope of quantification. Further, they highlight the ambivalence of valuation through quantification, which is not always given sufficient attention. For numbers are not necessarily or inherently "bad" in and of themselves, a device only for bureaucratic rationalization or economization under the rubric of neoliberal reform. Numbers may also be used by various groups in their attempts to aid social mobilization and empowerment, to fight for patients' and prisoners' rights, equality, humanity, or a host of other noble aspirations. Instruments of quantification are not only ways of making the world fit the metrics that are devised to measure it, they are integral to the ways in which democracy is justified and operationalized and personal responsibility enacted in regimes of quantified accountability.